Victor Valle
Professor Emeritus, M.S.J. Journalism
Areas of Interest
- Chicano Literature
- Activism
- Civil Rights history
- The Latino City
- Culture and Food
Contact Information
- Office: Bldg. 38, Rm. 111
- Phone: 805-756-1707
- Email: vvalle@calpoly.edu
About Victor Valle
Prof. Victor Valle started his writing career in the 1970s, publishing poetry, literary translations, and editing literary magazines. After receiving an MSJ from Medill in 1981, he joined the Los Angeles Times, where he earned several honors during his eight-year career there, including a Pulitzer Prize he shared with fellow Chicano journalists in 1984. He branched out to cultural history with Recipe of Memory: Five Generations of Mexican Cuisine, which garnered two literary nominations in 1996 and an Italian-language edition in 2000, the same year the University of Minnesota Press published Latino Metropolis. His book has since been reviewed in more than a dozen scholarly journals such as the Journal of American Ethnic History, the Journal of American History, the Journal of Historical Geography, and Ethnic and Racial Studies, which qualified it “A truly important work” (http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/V/valle_latino.html).
In 2007, the Library of America, publisher of “best and most significant American writing,” excerpted Recipe of Memory in American Food Writing: A Literary Anthology. Famed urban historian Mike Davis describes Valle’s next book, City of Industry: Genealogies of Power in Southern California, forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in August, “a stunning non-fiction sequel to Robert Towne’s ‘Chinatown.’”